So you mean if you totally changed the context? Gee, for this completely different situation that really has little to do with this one, yes people would be offended.
But, you know, the context and implications are so completely different. What's your point?
Unfortunately fighting discrimination purely by working to eliminate instances of it and revert to a gender-neutral (or race-neutral, or sexual orientation-neutral, etc) method of operation does not work. You must counter discrimination by elevating the oppressed group i.e. giving them privileges the already-privileged group does not possess. This is the basis of affirmative action, for example. It works because we care first and foremost about the net privilege one group possesses over the other, not that they have one particular privilege that another group does not (though obviously the long-term goal is to eliminate that as well). And, in case you were not aware, there remains a significant "privilege gap" between the genders and it is in favor of men. Once that gap no longer exists, we can talk about rolling back these programs.
What if the "privilege" you think you see is actually a difference in average ability or preferences between groups of people that are in fact different from each other?
Affirmative action does not help the groups it is directed towards, it simply handicaps them further by preventing them from being properly matched to their level or ability.
Clarence Thomas recently wrote about this in detail...
Slaveholders argued that slavery was a ‘positive good’ that civilized blacks and elevated them in every dimension of life. A century later, segregationists similarly asserted that segregation was not only benign, but good for black students. Although cloaked in good intentions, the University’s racial tinkering harms the very people it claims to be helping
If you'd like to learn about the unfortunate real outcomes of affirmative action then I strongly recommend researching Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell.
Promoting university enrollment for disadvantaged students really, like fucking really, is not the same as enslaving them. Likewise segregation was bad for a host of reasons among which was social isolation and misappropriation of resources (i.e. whites-only schools were well-funded while blacks-only schools were left to languish), both of which affirmative action is designed to remedy (and objectively does remedy based on fifty years studying the effects of these policies).
Clarence Thomas is a pretty shitty Justice tbh. Recommendation rejected.
The side arguing against affirmative action basically claimed they're for the idea of fixing the inequalities but that affirmative action with colleges is actually a net negative. In other words it's not making things more equal it's making them worse.
Their argument was basically that most kids inserted into top schools by affirmative action fail because they aren't at the level of the other students. Because they fail they don't become the things we want them to be come (doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc) and so the circle of inequality continues.
Where as if instead they went to a school with more students at the same level they'd more likely graduate, get the good jobs, and their kids would then make it to the high end schools. A win-win.
I don't know if it's true or not. They claimed to have lots of studies to back them up. But regardless it was interesting food for thought.
I'd love to have a more diverse workplace both in race and sex. I don't know the best way to get there.
But isolating/segregating with women-only groups like this is good?
I hope your dislike of Justice Thomas is just because you don't agree with his politics. I think your use of profanity is inappropriate regardless of your reasoning.
Perhaps you would like economist Thomas Sowell better. Or perhaps you're unwilling to give honest consideration to other views.
> If you don't believe that some races are inferior then there are no reasons for things like affirmative action.
"affirmative action" is short for "affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin".
Please explain how belief that some races are inferior is necessary to the belief that affirmative action is necessary. (Affirmative action often includes action directed specifically at addressing ways in which processes which might superficially seem neutral are, in effect, taking race indirectly into account because of circumstances resulting from the material effects of past discrimination and segregation, but that's a disadvantage of circumstance, not inherent inferiority.)
Affirmative action sets a lower barrier to entry for people of certain races, or it establishes quotas around certain races. This is to say that they cannot be held to the same standard of merit and expect a proportional outcome to something like admission to a particular college.
> without regard to their race, creed, color...
Affirmative action does the very thing it purports to ensure against, by discriminating on the bases of race.
If you believe that one race is inferior in some way and cannot compete on a level playing field then you may feel that affirmative action is necessary to give them a greater advantage. You mentioned circumstances which basically form an inferiority from past accrued disadvantage (I know you called it disadvantage of circumstance, but try to follow me for a moment). This doesn't seem to be the case with affirmative action admissions programs because they lower the bar for Blacks and raise the bar for Asians. Sure Blacks, were treated worst than Asians throughout most of American history, but Whites were not treated better than Asians.
Often the greatest beneficiaries of these programs are not native born African Americans, but recent African immigrants whose ancestors were not enslaved in the US, and not subject to past discrimination and segregation.
Incidentally, the two cases above would make good counterpoints to the idea of racial intellectual inferiority regardless of affirmative action and would likely have been able to gain admissions to a top university without it. But the unfortunate consequence of affirmative action is that many people will assume it is all because of their special treatment. Clarence Thomas had much more difficult obstacles to overcome, and he was subjected to this unfortunate assumption after graduating from law school.
I think the real intention of affirmative action is to achieve more equal outcomes across racial divides. I think that's a good objective. But I also think this is a policy that sounds much better than it actually works. If we're to have more equal outcomes, then we need more equal opportunities and we need an end to all forms of discrimination.
I already laid out the case for affirmative action which has nothing to do with any inherent racial ability whatsoever. Your reply:
> What if the "privilege" you think you see is actually a difference in average ability or preferences between groups of people that are in fact different from each other?
...is the textbook definition of racism (and sexism). Moreover it criticizes affirmative action precisely on the basis that there are inherent differences of ability among different groups, by race or gender, etc.
Initially I gave you the benefit of the doubt, assuming for the sake of argument and also in the interest of fair discussion that you probably didn't mean what you said, exactly. It is clear now I overestimated you.
In case anyone is wondering what the "textbook" definition of racism is:
the belief that "ALL" members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.
The belief that races may be different in average ability with respect to certain characteristics or that members of certain races have their own preferences is not racist. Some people like to use the term racist as some sort of a perverted trump card to silence an opposing view rather than engaging in an actual debate. Good luck trying to have a civil conversation with someone like that.
I refrained from calling you a racist even after you said the obviously racist thing. Moreover you first implied I'm racist out of the blue, because I disagree with a SCOTUS Justice who happens to be black. Also:
> The belief that races may be different in average ability with respect to certain characteristics or that members of certain races have their own preferences is not racist.
Quoting this for posterity in case you try to edit it out later. Sorry for you, I think you'll find the belief that black people are just not "on average" intelligent enough to be enrolled at university in the same proportion as white people, or that women are just too emotional to be in tech, or whatever, are rather unpopular opinions and likely to get you labeled (indeed, correctly) a racist and a sexist. Good luck with that.
I'm still trying to decide if you're holding the racism of lower expectation beliefs. Privileged and oppressed are just code words with no clear meaning. I don't know you, so I don't know why you would use profanity to describe Justice Thomas. He has solid principles based on his life's experiences and has had to endure a lot to serve so it makes no sense to me that anyone would describe him that way.
You're probably right about the labels but certainly wrong about the accuracy (thanks for the tip).
I'm not sure why some races perform better at some tasks, on average. I think that Blacks are faster sprinters than Asians, on average. I think that Asians have a higher preference for education than Blacks, on average. I think that the physical characteristics that we describe as races are shaped by evolutionary pressures. Darker skin is likely an adaptation for living closer to the equator. Blacks can probably withstand more direct sun exposure than Whites before developing skin cancer. None of this makes one race superior to another outside the narrow scope of the adaptive characteristic, and even then you only see the differences on average.
I suspect that the lower turnout of women in tech has more to do with preferences around work/life balance and family. But I wouldn't rule out other possible explanations. I've witnessed a few emotional breakdowns at work, but never from men. Which is fortunate because it seems that when men snap they go postal, on average.
> I disagree with a SCOTUS Justice who happens to be black
This kind of generic ideological flamewar, as unresolvable as it is tedious, is off topic on HN. Please don't do this again.
It's instructive how you managed to leap from gender to race without skipping a beat. That's an example of what I mean by generic. This is a marker—maybe the primary marker—of low quality discussion. It's always about pre-existing views, held for extraneous reasons, pretending to be a rational response to the story under discussion but reflexively heading straight for one of the same two or three places. A few people insist on taking every discussion there; the rest of us have visited countless times and wish not to return. This community exists for interesting things, of which these ideological back-and-forths are the antithesis.
It is changing the context. I don't know if you know this, but there are a lot of existing gender-based influences in the world already, they aren't inventing the concept.
But, you know, the context and implications are so completely different. What's your point?